Page 115 - Chasing Danny Boy: Powerful Stories of Celtic Eros

The Story Knife 105

whinings of neurotics, seeking reconciliation face-to-face, had
caused him to laugh out loud, because he was only a priest,
not a psychiatrist.
Other passengers nodded to his head of red hair haloed
by the bright summer sun, nearing solstice, but could not
penetrate his aura of privacy. He protected Himself from the
presumptuous privilege of strangers thrown together for a
week, eager to make new acquaintances, and tell their life
stories.
His cabin stewardess, a worldly little blonde from Strath-
chyde, Scotland, hardly surprised him with her openness. At
first he had been uncomfortable with her constant attentions,
making up his room, turning down his bed covers. He felt
viscerally the class distinctions of the world. He, no aristo-
crat, had never felt comfortable with the parish housekeeper,
because he always empathized with the people who cleaned
other people’s bathrooms. But his stewardess put him at ease.
She was on top of the roles acted out on shipboard.
She too knew what people were for.
He figured she knew what he was for.
His stewardess, pretending the black-and-white Roman
collar that tucked out of his suitcase was for the last night’s
costume party, told him what no one else would tell. She told
him how passengers, perhaps pursuing some metaphor of
life’s voyage in a ship, boarded to die, how one or two each trip
died, how they were quietly taken away to refrigeration below
decks. Old people, ancient ones, and sickly people, terminal
ones, invisible among the fiercely robust breeders and feed-
ers determined to have the good time they had paid for, had
boarded the ship to die. That was not what the cruise ship’s
frenetic television commercials had promised, not the way
they promised shipboard partying, sports, and fun.
Father Brian Kelly, after twenty-five years in the confes-
sional, was not surprised at her tale.
But he had not expected the dark surprise of the cabin
boy from Genoa.
He’d thought he was beyond temptation.
The young man slept well below the passenger decks with
the crew. Brian’s stewardess told him of their small rooms
with no windows. “This is a prison for us, it is,” she said. His
own cabin had a porthole whose three brass bolts he had
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